I haven't personally worked in government agencies or anything government related so I wouldn't know how everything works there. I have worked only in corporate World. I imagine it's similar for many people. From corporate experience I have seen some bizarre incentives for instance where results based on amount of people make 0 sense whatsoever. As a naive person I would imagine that everyone tries their best, but really it's politics, coasting and fake achievements, right. It doesn't matter what you do, it matters what it seems like you do and to whom. So I know that in certain circumstances incentives can be lined up in such a way that there's no conspiracy, but the whole outcome is bizarre. But it's combination of very many things and explaining, figuring out or even trying to solve the issue is herculean task and if somebody could solve it, they would be a trillionaire.

It may seem like I just spoke whole nothing about nothing, and it shouldn't matter, but if anyone is in such an experience where people you would think are smart, make a lot of money, but the output is non-sensical, it might be hard to believe that something in the government or even on the science level works much better than that. Actually, the larger the corporation the more ridiculous things seem to be at times, because the easier it is to hide things if you are skilled and the less anyone cares.

It could be a situation where nobody has full access to anything to question something confidently. Or only very few people know everything and it would take again herculean effort to understand what exactly is happening. There's a bystander effect everywhere, where any specialist or expert thinks that surely somebody else has validated all of it, and I don't have to bother with it, because I don't have an incentive to do so. So for example it could be lack of incentives to validate everything when validation would take huge amount of resources. And if you notice a discrepancy somewhere somehow, the incentive is always to convince yourself that you are just missing something and ignore that, because surely some other smarter people somewhere have already dealt with this.

So all of it could bring a situation where something that could potentially cause harm is not detected, because people on collective level assume that somebody else validated everything when really there wasn't no one with access to collective data incentivised to do so. For instance a situation where Entity A creates a product B, where there's other Entities from C to D validating the product B, but everything is under a strong time pressure, and financial incentives are always aligned as such that you should give benefit of the doubt to product B, because if product B doesn't succeed, it's actually harmful for both A and the C-D validating it, because the C-D validating, if they have a track record of being too critical, they could miss future business opportunities etc. Then regulators E validating product B will already see data that is polished with benefit of the doubt, and they don't have time to fully question it, it could be that there's inherent bias to approve the product B because of good relationship and networking dynamics between the people etc.

So I'm not saying this is how it is, but this is one way I could see something that could cause harm being not detected by a whole mass of people without a huge conspiracy going on.